15 Super Useful Apps for Busy Entrepreneurs

Since the launch of Apple's App Store in 2008 there has been a flood of smartphone apps all with the intention of making our lives easier. Because of these apps we can find out instantly what song is playing on the radio without having to be told, we can know the square roots of pi is to the 137th decimal, and much more.

Take a look at this list of other useful apps. They might teach you about something you didn't know before or help to make your life just a bit easier.

Jasmine, a better YouTube player.

Kevin Smith, Business Insider

Jasmine is a minimal YouTube app replacement. We love how Jasmine allows us to play YouTube audio in the background, freeing us up to do other things with our phone.
The app is chock-full of features including a nighttime/low light function, full playlist support, and Airplay, Apple's feature for streaming audio and video to your living room

Price: Free

Available on: iOS

Catch is a fun way to take voice, photo and text notes.

Catch helps you capture your most important ideas so you never miss anything. You can create voice, photo, and text notes, online and offline. It's incredibly easy to share checklists to collaborate with others, too.

For those worried about security, users can protect notes with a four-digit PIN.

Price: Free

Available on: Android and iPhone

Slice helps you track and organize all your online shopping.

Slice

Besides being an awesome package tracker, Slice is an app that helps you stay on top of all your online purchases.
The app securely scans your email and finds receipts from iTunes, Amazon, and wherever else you shop online creating great archive of purchases.

Price: Free

Available on: Android and iOS

SwiftKey for Android is a keyboard replacement that might replace your old keyboard.

Business Insider / Matthew Lynley

Swift Key can change how you type on your Android. The app automatically detects how you've typed in the past -- from text messaging, mail, chat, Twitter and a few other services -- and serves up suggestions on what you're going to say.

Price: $3.99

Available on: Android

Check the Weather is handy for tracking changes in the weather.

Kevin Smith/Business Insider

Check the Weather provides a beautiful interface to view the weather in your current location or favorite city. The app provides a 10-day outlook, precipitation stats, and even weather advisories.

Price: $1.99

Available on: iOS

Use Prismatic to stay on top of the news you care about.

Prismatic is a news reading app that strips away clutter like ads and presents you with a simple, easy-to-read interface. Think of it as Instapaper meets Flipboard.

As you use Prismatic the app gets to know you, delivering the stories you're likely to care about based on your interests. The app knows your interests based on the articles you've read and the topics you've chosen. It also shows you Twitter commentary on articles from the people you follow.

Price: Free

Available on: iPhone and Web

Shazam: Know exactly what song is playing.

iTunes

How many times have you wanted to know what song is playing but you have no way of figuring it out? We remember the first time we used Shazam and it just worked.
We're still amazed every time it works.

Price: Free

Available on: Android,Blackberry, iOS, and Windows Phone.

Evernote: Search scanned documents.

Mac App Store

Evernote's goal is to help you remember everything. The app organizes and tags your most important notes. The feature that makes Evernote super smart is its ability to search any scanned file or document.

Price: Free

Available on: Android,Blackberry, iOS, Windows Phone, Web OS, PC, Mac,Google Chrome, and the web.

Robin for Android: A driver-friendly version of Siri.

Robin is an Android version of Siri. You can ask Robin for directions, local places, real-time parking, traffic info, gas prices, weather, your Twitter news and much more.

Robin was built with drivers in mind, it is most useful when behind the wheel because she helps you to keep your eyes on the road and off of your device.

Price: Free

Available on: Android

Nike+: Have a record of where you ran and how long it took you.

Before Nike+, runners never really knew exactly how far they ran. This smart app allows you to track your distance, calories burned and pace.

The best part? All the information is logged across multiple runs letting you know how well you're doing.

Price: Free

Available on: Android andiOS.

WolframAlpha: The computer's computer.

The WolframAlpha app essentially takes the entire WolframAlpha site and crams it into your iPhone, iPad or Android. WolframAlpha can answer questions on math, statistics, data analysis, physics, chemistry, engineering and more.

Price: $3.99

Available on: Android andiOS

Apex Launcher for Android takes your customization even further.

Apex Launcher is a fast and customizable launcher for your Android's home screen. Apex helps you to customize your Android's grid size and allows you to have nine different pages. In addition, users can create a scrollable dock with up to 7 icons per page.

Price: Free

Available on: Android

Notability: Voice recording and handwriting integration for your notes.

Notability integrates handwriting, voice recording, PDF annotation and media into a single app. You can even enhance your notes by adding pictures from your photo library or from the iPad camera. Insert web clips, figures, and drawings to compliment your notes. Crop, resize, and draw on images to make them perfect.

Price: $0.99

Available on: iOS

Google Chrome: All your tabs from all your devices in one place.

Google Chrome is a smart app because it allows users to sync web pages across multiple computers. Now when we pick up our iPhone, Android or iPad we can still see exactly what we were looking at on our desktop.

Price: Free

Available on: Android, iOS, and Mac and PC

Spoken Layer: You can listen instead of read.

iTunes

Spoken layer converts an entire webpage into a podcast for easy listening. The app makes it possible for you to listen to articles while on a walk or commuting.

Price: Free

Available on: iOS

YouTube to Reward Partners Who Put Ratings on Content

YouTube announced to is U.S. partners today that it has recently rolled out its content rating system to all U.S. partner-uploaded content, and giving away a prize to the first ten  partners that add ratings to all of their content by the end of July.

"Now, when you upload a video that does not have a specified content rating (i.e. MPAA or TV rating), we ask that the partner rate content in these five categories: Language, Nudity, Sexual Situations, Violence and Drug Use. Our content rating system allows you to assign ratings to your YouTube videos either during the upload process or afterwards," saysYouTube's Mahin Ibrahim. "The ratings are reversible, meaning that you can change or remove them at any time if you feel they no longer accurately describe your content."

YouTube says it is doing this because giving advertisers more options means potentially more monetized content for partners. "The vision here is that we'll be able to offer advertisers better ways to match their ads to content based on your self-assigned ratings; accurate ratings that allow for a better content-advertising match can lead to partners like yourself making more money in the end," says Ibrahim.

The prize is a YouTube t-shirt and cap. To win it partners are asked to add accurate content ratings to new videos and go back to all of their old videos to add appropriate content ratings to them as well.

YouTube Celebrates Two Billion Views Per Day

This month marks the fifth anniversary of YouTube's launch, and to celebrate the occasion, YouTube's created a special channel featuring celebrities' and regular users' thoughts on the matter.  And YouTube's also made a big announcement regarding its size: the site's now receiving more than two billion views per day.

In an email to WebProNews, a YouTube spokesperson noted that two billion views is about "double the prime time audience of all three major U.S. networks combined," which is rather impressive.

More changes are supposed to be on the way to level the time spent viewing stats (15 minutes on YouTube versus five hours in front of the television), as well, with relevancy being a top priority.

As for the new channel, the spokesperson explained that the "'My YouTube Story' campaign showcases video portraits of well-known and everyday users telling their very personal stories of how YouTube has impacted their lives.  Anyone can join in by uploading their own story at www.youtube.com/fiveyear."

Conan O'Brien, Vint Cerf, Katie Couric, Damian Kulash, Jessica Rose, and Ryan Higa have already taken part.

YouTube Makes More Homepage Changes

By Chris Crum - Thu, 04/23/2009 - 10:01 for WebPro News

Tweaks Video Sections

About a month ago, YouTube changed the names of some of its video sections. They introduced Spotlight, Featured, and Promoted Videos. Now YouTube has made some more changes to its homepage when users are signed out. YouTube Product Manager Brian Glick gives the following rundown of what's new:

- We've streamlined "Spotlight Videos" and given it greater prominence on the page. It won't appear every day, but when it does, videos will be organized around a theme, such as today's Earth Day videos, or a community trend. Feel free to suggest themes in the comments below. (Oh, and if you're signed in, whenever we show Spotlight Videos it'll appear wherever it does today, according to your settings.)

- "Videos Being Watched Now" got a makeover; we hope this gives greater emphasis to the videos that are rising up right now, according to what people are watching.

- The new "Most Popular" section features the hottest video in each category at the moment, in addition to the overall Most Viewed and Top Favorited video. This category display should help surface a wider variety of videos.

YouTube of course recently added full-length feature films and television shows into its mix as it strives to better monetize itself in Hulu-like fashion. The site is also testing a new channel redesign that users can get to by going here.

YouTube continues to dominate the online video picture in terms of total number of video streams and unique viewers, by a wide margin. Monetization is a different story however. We can likely expect to see a lot of changes with YouTube in the foreseeable future as we have over the last several months.

YouTube Launches YouTube RealTime Beta

By Chris Crum - Thu, 04/23/2009 - 14:54 for WebPro News

Makes YouTube More Like Facebook In Some Ways

Today YouTube has launched the beta version of YouTube RealTime, which comes in the form of a toolbar that resides in the lower right corner of the page on YouTube.

From this toolbar, users will be able to see which YouTube friends are currently online (much like Facebook) and what they're watching. A history of their recent activities on the site are also able to be viewed as well as real-time notifications when they perform activities like commenting, favoriting, and uploading.

At this point, YouTube is only offering the feature to the first 100 people that say "Yes! Sign me up" in the comments section of this post on the official YouTube Blog. Each of these 100 people will get an invite.

"Please keep in mind that you will need to have friends on YouTube for this to work -- the more you have, the richer the experience, so be sure you accept friend invites and actively manage the list," says Ryan Junee, a Product Manager on the YouTube Team."

Junee encourages those who get the invites to give feedback via theforums or in the same comments section.

YouTube also announced some changes to its home page for signed out users today. More on that here.

YouTube Finally Goes to the Next Level

By Chris Crum - Fri, 04/17/2009 - 08:37

Starts Offering Movies and Shows

YouTube has finally announced after months of talks about deals with major media companies that they are now offering new sections on the site dedicated specifically to movies and television shows.

Partners include Crackle, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz and many others, which contribute thousands of television show episodes and hundreds of films. They also bring the social element of YouTube along with them because users can still comment, favorite, and share the videos.

"This addition is one of many efforts underway to ensure that we're offering you all the different kinds of video you want to see, from bedroom vlogs and citizen journalism reports to music videos and full-length films and TV shows," says the YouTube team in a blog post.

Obviously this puts YouTube in even more direct competition with Hulu, which specializes in TV shows and movies. Though Hulu has been growing steadily in popularity, YouTube is still ahead by far. This could push the site that much further out in front.

YouTube also announced a wider roll-out of in-stream ads, which they have been testing since October. Hulu users and television watchers are already used to this.

At this point, shows and movies are only available in the US. However, YouTube intends to expand the features into other regions "as soon as possible. They also note that the "subscriptions" tab will be available worldwide within the next several weeks.